Doug Aitken Quotes

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

Western civilization shapes the content of my films, provides me with subjects that haven't been used before.

I've written a screenplay that is a series of monologues and songs; they form this sort of human tapestry across time and place. The form is strange, but I find it really fascinating.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time.

The American formula things are out there but they don't have any stories to tell - we have all the stories to tell - but they're all formula.

You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

Art is a tool by which society extends its perception.

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

Genes cannot tell us how to catalogue or comprehend human diversity. Environments can, cultures can, geographies can, histories can.

History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

Things are politics for a long time before they become history.

The Arab world’s wave of change was a century in the making, Why expect its effects to become clear in the space of months

It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.

It might be a very human thing across the board, but we, in America, love a story - we need a story to get involved in. But then everything becomes more about how the story protects a certain perception as we pick sides.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.

I'm trying to tell the story of the evolution of America. Each biography is a life in time, and I can see there's a particular task for each generation that I write about.

Mine is, after all, the generation that had come to maturity drinking in the forebodings of the Silones, Koestlers, and Richard Wrights. It had left us ill-prepared for decisions that had to be made in our own time about Algeria, Birmingham, or the Bay of Pigs.

Profound political shifts - events that suddenly split families and friends, cut across social classes, and dramatically rearrange alliances - do not happen every day in Europe, but neither are they unknown.

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

I'm having this disbelief and dissatisfaction with an establishment that feels like it's moving backward, and I think there's a similar feeling with everyone of my age and in the world of music and artistic stuff. Art is an important way those feelings get expressed and help people process their feelings and opinions.